See. Book. Go.

Red soil and pink sheep

The story so far. Fish with prototype legs crawl out of the water onto land at roughly the time Dartmoor is first forming. Later (a lot later), continents collide to form a supercontinent. The UK is in the centre of this continent and what is now Devon is a dome of rock under which hard granite is forming. Over time, the dome of rock erodes and the granite becomes exposed and we have Dartmoor National Park.

But between the creation of the supercontinent and the erosion of the dome of rock is a vast stretch of time. For 80 million years of that time, the UK was a desert. Stranded in the centre of the supercontinent, a huge distance from water, the UK turned into a Sahara.

Time moved on and in the area that is now Devon, the chemicals from this desert rock leached down into the rocks below and stained them red. That’s the red soil we see today when we drive around Devon.

And because the soil’s red, the fluffy white sheep get covered in the stuff and turn pink. So, a pink sheep has about 300 million years’ worth of time in its wool.